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Friday, May 13, 2016

Time to put principle before party

For Republicans, the primary may be over but this is still a time for choosing.

On Thursday, Donald Trump
trotted up to Capital Hill to meet with Speaker Paul Ryan and the GOP
leadership to try to assure them that he is not an electoral neutron
bomb. Mutual hatred toward Hillary seems to be the closest the party can get to unity right now.

Fundamentally, this is a matter of individual principle versus party loyalty.

The Republican establishment is dividing into the Trump Resistance and the Trump Rationalizers.

Members of the Trump resistance look at his demagoguery and see disaster. For them, as Stuart Stevens has argued in The Daily Beast,
refusing to support Trump is a moral decision more than a political
one. Most of the leading figures on the center-right have chosen this
path: both Presidents Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney along with blue
state Republican governors like Charlie Baker, Bruce Rauner, and Larry
Hogan. They don’t want to be tainted with support for Trump and his
policies and vicious rhetoric when the reckoning and rebuilding comes.

The Trump Rationalizers are making a calculation that the famously
authentic candidate has been lying to the base during most of the
campaign to date. The Donald they know was just trying to seal the deal
with the conservative populists by saying things that no New York
billionaire could really believe. So they believe that he’ll break out a
yuge Etch-a-Sketch and pivot to the center for the general election
and, if it comes to that, governing.

Some of these rationalizers are simply motivated by self-interest. They
see the Trump train as a way to get ahead. The elected officials will
raise their profile, get prime speaking roles at the convention, and one
will secure the vice presidential slot. Consultants see a chance to get
rich on the ultimate gravy train while on-air apologists see Trump as a
shortcut to a few months of fame, such as it is. Others rationalize
their support by shrugging that they are simply following their
constituents. It’s not surprising to see someone like Bobby Jindal
flip-flop on Trump. But it’s sad to see former leaders of the
center-right like Chris Christie and Jon Huntsman back what they must
know is a kamikaze mission in the name of party loyalty or political
self-interest.

This
shouldn’t be a jump ball. The Republican Party has nominated someone who
appeals to authoritarian impulses, not conservative ideas. If you can’t
take a strong stand against someone with a demonstrated record of
ignorance, division, and demagoguery, then what’s your deeper purpose
for being in politics? Choosing between surrogates Sarah Palin and Paul
Ryan really shouldn’t be that tough a call in 2016.

For Hillary Clinton the larger question is how she will respond to the historic opportunity that is Donald Trump. (Don't miss the rest, here)